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Paragraph on Phantoms In The Brain

The documentary shows how Visual neglect is the opposite to Grahams condition, and is when the blind-sight pathway is damaged. Bill Staten suffers from this and doesn’t pay attention to the left side of his world. Peggy who also neglects the left side drew some daisies from memory, all of which were missing their left sides. This shows her disortion of conciousness and that she is also not consciously aware of the left-side of her world.

Tests using a mirror on Bill show that he does not recognize reflections, when the mirror is placed to his side. Bill also has anosognosia which is due to right hemisphere damage, he denies his left hand not recognizing that it si paraysed. When he is asked to move it he relpies it is tied, still believeing he can use it even though he cannot prove this. Ella Sinclair also suffers from this denial through anosognosia and Professor R explains this occurs when the right and left hemispheres of the brain are not working together.

The left hemisphere is engaging in denial or self deception but the right side is not correcting, checking or confirming this. In edisode two Dr Ramachandran investigates three bizarre human conditions, prosopagnosia, the capgras delusion and temporal lobe epilepsy. He explains that there are two main areas in the brain, the ‘what’ area and the ‘how’ area. Philip has a problem with recognition, but there is nothing wrong with his vision.

The damage is in his ‘what’ area of the brain making him unable to recognize what it is he is seeing, in this case what an animal is called. Professor Ramachandran states that this si due to damage in a small area of the tempiral lobes in the brain, and that different memory filters were destroyed, which also makes him unable to recognize faces, but can recognize voices.

The Capgras delusion is similar to this David who suffers from this woke up from a coma one day and did not recognize his mother and father believing they are imposters. He even believed his own house was not his, but more extraordinary was him believing himself to be ‘another David’. The professor explains how what we see causes emotion, and when David sees his mother no emotion is produced, as the message does not reach the emotion centres and only goes through the visual centres. All auditory centres are not effected by this